Sun Fire x4500

The “Thumper” (their name, not mine!) is out. It’s a 4U dual Opteron server with space for 48 SATA disks. Fill it up with 500GB disks and you’ve got a brand name storage box for ???????2.50/GB. It runs Solaris 10 and they’re touting it as a perfect fit for their ZFS filesystem. ZFS is being pitched as the replacement to RAID, with replication and rollback built in. These don’t have a hardware RAID controller though. Sun claim that they can do it faster in software than any hardware controller and it makes sense. A couple of 2.6GHz general purpose processors should be able to out perform a <500MHz custom part, even though they need to run an OS too.

What do you do once you need more than 24TB in a single volume. Do you put everything behind a gateway, and consolidate it there, (and deal with a performance bottleneck and single point of failure), or use them as components of an copper Ethernet (rather than fibre channel) SAN and assemble the volumes at each server (which is a management overhead, and a big CPU load on each application server)?

The other tricky thing is what to do if a drive pops? Sun are touting hot swap capabilities, so you don't have to power off the server to swap out the disk, but they're not front accessible, so you need to pull the server out of the rack and pop off the top to change out a disk. You need to be very careful with your cable management at the back of the rack to reliably pull a server forward without disconnecting power, network, KVM etc. So far we've not taken the risk and just gone with a mix of front accessible EMC units and an IBM ESS 800, which is a standalone unit, designed for high-density storage.

Still, Sun do a 60 day trial, so I might just give my friendly neighborhood Sun reseller a call ….